E.B. WHITE, ESSAYIST AND STYLIST, DIES

Published: October 2, 1985

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Walking with a visitor over to the general store, he took a bottle of orange juice to the counter. ''Hi, Al,'' he said to the proprietor. ''Hi, Andy,'' the proprietor replied, and at the same time handed him a copy of the local paper, The Ellsworth American, published by his longtime friend J. Russell Wiggins. Now and then, he would contribute a letter or essay to the paper.

Driving on a few miles, he stopped at the boatyard run by his son, Joel, a naval architect from M.I.T., and studied the small boats jiggling on the windy waters. In a cavernous boatshed, he climbed aboard the 19-foot sloop Martha, named after his granddaughter, which his son built for him. He sailed these waters, with friends and family, most of his life.

He pointed to the carved dolphins, four on each side of the bow, that he designed and decorated in gold. Like Louis the trumpeter swan in his book ''who thought how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth,'' E. B. White was on the side of good luck and the angels.

Fondness for Geese

Back at Allen Cove, he spotted the geese on the pond below the farmhouse and barn. He picked up some apples and waved them aloft, inviting the geese to have a snack before dinner. ''Geese are the greatest clowns in the world,'' he said. ''I wouldn't be without them.''

To followers of Mr. White's work, his Maine home was historic literary territory. The barn inspired many of the characters in his stories for children. In a corner of a cellar window a spider spun a web but, he said, it was a different species from the large gray spider that lived here with Wilbur the pig in ''Charlotte's Web.''

In his small gray boathouse facing the cove, he wrote ''One Man's Meat,'' most of ''Charlotte's Web'' and, he said, ''10,000 newsbreaks.''

These are the satirical and humorous observations that round off the columns in almost every issue of The New Yorker. Although uncredited, they bore the White imprint for many years. Their headings became part of the language: ''Neatest Trick of the Week''; ''Go Climb a Tree Department''; ''Letters We Never Finished Reading''; ''Our Forgetful Authors''; ''Funny Coincidence Department''; ''Wind on Capitol Hill.''

'Holding Down a Job'

Until recently, The New Yorker sent him a package of news items every week. ''I like doing the breaks because it gives me a feeling of holding down a job and affords me a glimpse of newspapers all over the country,'' Mr. White said. ''I turned in my first one 50 years ago. Everybody in the shop used to do them. One day I got a call from Harold Ross asking where I was. I said I was home with the chicken pox. And he said, 'I finally get someone who can do these breaks, and he gets the chicken pox.' ''

For his contribution to American letters, Mr. White was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1971. In 1963, President Kennedy presented him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1973, received its gold medal for essays and criticism. In 1978, he received a special Pulitzer Prize for the body of his work.

Two years ago, after he had begun to slow down, he typed, with his usual good humor, a long letter to a friend: ''I have a first degree heart block, have lost the sight in my right eye because of a degenerated retina, can't wind my wrist watch because my fingers have knuckled under to arthritis, can't tie my shoelaces, am dependent on seven different pills to stay alive, can't remember whether I took the pills or didn't.

''On the other hand, I am camped alone, here at Bert Mosher's Camps on the shore of Great Pond which I first visited in 1904; I have my 15-foot green Old Town canoe with me, which I brought over on the top of my car; I sat out a New England boiled dinner this noon by anticipating it with martinis and cheese-and-crackers before walking up to the farmhouse, and after dinner (or lack of same) went fishing for bass in my canoe.

''There is a certain serenity here that heals my spirit, and I can still buy Moxie in a tiny supermarket six miles away. Moxie contains gentian root, which is the path to the good life. This was known in the second century before Christ, and it is a boon to me today.''

In addition to his son, Joel, of Brooklin, Me., Mr. White is survived by two stepchildren, Roger Angell of Manhattan and Nancy Stableford of Easton, Pa.; nine grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.